Games: I am now the proud owner of Warhammer: Dawn of War Onslaught and Wyrmspan, and am going through the rulebooks ahead of playing them with Geek BBQers in the new year.

Music: Alas, I skipped both yesterday's pub session and today's house session to focus on end-of-year adulting, so didn't do much with music this week. Nor do I dare to practice at home, given how bone dry the apartment is.

Podcasts: N/A

Roleplaying: None this week, but ma soeur did get me a ridiculously funny D&D themed mug, which I have been enjoying with an obscene amount of tea.

Television: We wrapped of The American Revolution, which was excellent overall, as have been the conversations with the GC and other friends who've watched. It's amazing how differently this history--and various aspects of it--are or are not taught depending on what school district you grew up in.

We kicked off the weekend with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which was great fun to see in theaters and just as fun to watch at home. Doric and Holga are such great characters, as is Simon, but Xenk will always be my forever character from this movie.

The Fellowship of the Ring, which is a permanent winter movie for me (just as the book is a winter read). The characters look nothing like the characters in my head, but oh my god did Jackson get the look of the world down cold. And National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is one of those childhood movies that, like The Princess Bride, I could probably recite in real time.

The GC & I weren't planning on watching AEW: World's End this past Saturday, but then one of the Geek BBQers offered to host, and it turned out to be a really solid PPV with tons of good matches. I loved seeing Babes of Wrath and FTG get their wins; the Darby Allen/Gabe Kidd match was intense, Mox's storyline is coming out of the doldrums at last, and Joe, Swerve, and MJF are guaranteed fire whenever they're in the ring, let alone when they're in it together. It was a small watch group, only six people at its height, and one of them was a curiosity attendee who'd never watched wrestling before. But she is also a TRPGer and former gymnast who got it immediately, and it was a ton of fun watching her get into what AEW is about. On top of that, we got to commune with bonus cats.

The GC and I started Max Headroom: a rewatch for me and new show for the GC. Max Headroom is sadly, criminally, largely forgotten today...probably because of how freaking prescient it was. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely A Lot of vintage '80s elements in this series, but. This show really did predict the future in a lot of uncomfortable ways. Cambridge Analytica-style micro-segmenting of audiences? Yup. Novel digital technologies that literally kill people? Yup. Megacorporations covering it all up for profit? Yup.

"Wow," said the GC when we were about 15 minutes in, "this is just Cyberpunk 2077." And it is. "Wow," said the GC after Max Headroom made his first on-screen appearance, "that's just...Jim Carrey." And I'd never thought about it before, but he's right. Or more accurately, Jim Carrey stole his entire shtick from Matt Frewer's Headroom and no one acknowledges it. We started with the show (I can't find my copy of the movie) but we're already two episodes in and it still really holds up.

Video Games: It's been a bit of a rough week, so I've leaned heavily into two of my major comfort games: Botanicula and Thank Goodness You're Here. We also got--but have not started playing yet--Sea of Stars

これで以上です。
Last week was a pretty good one for leisure media and entertainment.

Games: A satellite member of the GeekBBQ crew had their birthday gathering at said GeekBBQ this Saturday; between the various attendees we had close to 40 board game options. Many were familiar, but I did play the new-to-me Mountain Goats, which was both a great deal of fun and perfectly suited to playing in a boisterous, distraction-filled environment. Moreover, it is a game I could easily recreate on the fly with index cards and ad hoc game pieces, and probably will do. I played the also new-to-me Wavelength, which lived up to the enjoyability hype even if (as confirmed by subsequent research) the people explaining the rules to us did not quite have them all down.

Music: This week I was part of the live music, first at a recurring Sunday pub session, and later at an invite only(!) house session. The second in particular was a blast: I was the only non-string melody instrument, a fact which delighted the other string melody and backing participants and which is...not always the reception flute/whistle players get. Better yet, I know a ton of tunes that they do not--and vice versa--so there is a lot of cross pollination to look forward to. (I knew things were going to work out when the host remarked, "I wish we had another moody hornpipe to go with Rights of Man." Moody hornpipe, you say? I have several, and I already have them in sets, too. 😎) I am really, really looking forward to the next gathering with both these groups.

Podcasts: Revisited some segments from earlier Grimfrost podcasts, but nothing new.

Roleplaying: The GC DMed a one-shot for the Occasional DM Heist Group on Friday, in which I revisited my goblin rogue--one of my favorite characters. This session's heist involved stealing a magical portrait from an arcane cult mansion. I'd hoped for more arcane cult flavor from the setting than it actually involved, but the heist itself was a lot of fun and we once more managed to pull it off solely through fuckery and smooth talking. As a bonus, one of the players will be DMing a Cyberpunk one-shot for us this Friday, and we set up the planning and logistics for that.

We left Saturday's birthday party a bit early to play the latest session with Newest D&D Campaign, which picked up after a major cliffhanger and concluded on another major cliffhanger. I love this campaign, this DM, and this group so much. This is just one of those campaigns were everything jived at the first session and has not gone off the rails since. Better yet, one of the other players and I are going to set up a mini-session for our two characters.

Television: We wrapped up season 12 of Last Week Tonight, continued to poke halfheartedly at AEW ahead of the PPV, and watched the first hour of The American Revolution.

Video Games: Still playing Ultima IV. Still trying to get the freaking pirate ship. The GC completed Suikoden I and is making steady progress on II, after which I will revisit them myself.

これで以上です。
Friday of course being Samhain/Halloween, I did my traditional daily bakes in the afternoon before heading down the street to the neighborhood's annual block party--one of the oldest and most well-established in the city. Several streets are closed to traffic (and several more de facto closed to traffic just by the number of pedestrians on them). Although a bit scaled back since covid (no bouncy castles or the like this year), there were still a ton of trick-or-treaters, and pretty much everyone of any age was in costume. Last year, the GC and I were Over The Garden Wall's Sara and Wirt, and we had such fun making those costumes that we reprised them this year.

As two of the GeekBBQ regulars now live on one of the main streets, we spent the majority of the evening handing out candy outside their place, then went in after the onslaught had wrapped up and watched:

What We Do In The Shadows an annual Halloween watch for us until it got popular enough that Kanopy lost the license to streaming services. Luckily, the GeekBBQers own a copy, so we were able to watch again. The whole movie is great, but I ride or die for the werewolves (not swearwolves! ...Seriously, I didn't think anything could ever top Adventure Time's Whywolves, but these guys absolutely do). This one is a forever classic.

The Craft I grew up with Fairuza Balk in The Worst Witch and was newly smitten with her in the melodramatic made-for-TV movie Shame a few years later, and so was very stoked when I learned that she and Melody from Hey Dude were going to be in The Craft. Then I saw The Craft. I didn't like it then and I don't like it nowRead more... ) Or rather, I like the first half of the movie a great deal, and the rest? Hard no thank you.

Dark Shadows It's a fine movie, but not one I was every particularly into, so I "watched" it during lulls in the conversation.

Music: Saturday was PorchFest. I don't know if it was because people were out late the night before, but the first two hours of the thing were dead; almost no one on the streets anywhere. It was so stark we started wondering if the thing had been postponed and we somehow had just not got the message? But there were bands playing, so that couldn't have been right. Then, at 4:00 pm a cloud of people emerged from metro like a horde of lanternflies just as we'd decided decamp for our afternoon walk; it felt like walking against the entire tide of humanity. Walk completed, we returned to find that things had picked up somewhat, although even with the new injection of humanity there were way fewer people than I've ever seen at any previous PorchFest. (I think it was a combination of Halloween being the night before, the many Halloween parties later that night, the city being under crypto-martial law, and the furlough.)

We watched a few "solo woman with an acoustic guitar" performances, a husband-and-wife duo (both veterans; the "likening everything to soldiers/combat/honor/patriotism" lyrical lens did not resonate with us personally, but they were still very, very good), and several very good punk and blues bands, and the neighborhood cover band that has played as long as I've been going to PorchFest.

Podcasts: Episodes 9 and 10 of the Grimfrost podcast, with academics Neil Price and Anders Kaliff, both fascinating guests. I enjoyed the conversation with Price a little bit more because it felt slightly more grounded in fact than academic speculation, but the speculation in the latter episode was presented as such and also very interesting.

Television: As ever, the current Last Week Tonight episode (the main segment of which was unfortunately not as nuanced as one would have hoped), and some halfhearted poking at AEW Collision and AEW Dynamite.

However, on Sunday, the GeekBBQ crew reconvened to watch episodes 2 and 3 of Dimension 20: Titan Takedown, which brings together three of my longstanding loves: Greek mythology, D&D, and pro-wrestling. Gawd, what a great freaking campaign. I love The New Day. I love Bayley. (Chelsea Green came after I'd all but stopped watching WWE but holy crap, she may just get me back into it.) When I was first trying to get the GC to dip a toe into wrestling, I plugged it as "a D&D superhero campaign with live acrobatics", and it is. Which is why this campaign in particular just works so well. Because, while some of the party members are new to D&D, they have definitely roleplayed fantasy characters with ideals, bonds, flaws, and defining personality traits in a longform improv storyline. It's incredibly funny, it's dramatic, it's more emotionally rewarding than it has any right to be, and I am very much looking forward to the final episode.

Video Games: I am very much into comfort food gaming as I wrap up my fourth week of being forced to work full time for free. And so it was that I got my hands on Suikoden I&II Remastered...

...and began a replay of Ultima IV, having ceded the console to the GC, who has never played any of the Suikodens before. ("Do you think I'd like them?" he asked. "As long as you realize going in that they are not BG, let alone BG3, yeah," I told him. And by and large, he has enjoyed them albeit with some--warranted--groaning at the most Extremely Retro elements. For my part, I have enjoyed watching him react to the game in real time, and yeah, these games still hold up.)

As does Ultima, once I'd gotten into the grove of replaying it. It still is one of the OGs of computer RPGing, and I have a renewed appreciation for how cleverly it's written given all the development constraints--graphics, sound, memory, distribution--in play when it came out. This is a game without a world map, let alone fast travel. I spawned as a mage and spent an exasperating three days grinding just to get off the island where mages spawn and to Castle Britannia so that I could get the gear, reagents, and party members necessary to get going on the actual Avatar quest. But I am well on my way now, although irritatingly grinding again along the coastline, waiting for a pirate ship to spawn so I can commandeer it and get to the other islands I need to visit. (There were a billion pirate ships when it was just me, with no spells, armor, or ranged weapon, and thus no hope of surviving an encounter with them. And now...nada. Go figure.)

これで以上です。
lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
( Jan. 1st, 2025 08:34 am)
Being a list of the movies, podcasts, television, and tabletop and computer games I completed, live shows I went to, and albums I purchased, in 2024.

2024 Multimedia List
Movies
  • A Christmas Story
  • Coded Bias
  • Colossal
  • Deadpool 2
  • Deadpool & Wolverine
  • Mad Max: Furiosa
  • National Lampoon Christmas Vacation
  • Palm Springs
  • Surveilled
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past

    Podcasts
  • Am I Broken: Season 4 Episode 2
  • Master: The allegations against Neil Gaiman

    Live Music
  • And So I Watch You From Afar
  • Beck & the National Symphony Orchestra
  • Caspian
  • Cat Power
  • CSS
  • Dance With The Dead
  • Dandy Warhols
  • Disturbed
  • Djunah
  • Elder
  • Ex-Pilots
  • Falling in Reverse
  • The Hu
  • Iron Maiden
  • Korine
  • Live
  • Modest Mouse
  • Nils Hoffman
  • Nora En Pure
  • Opeth
  • Pixies
  • PJ Harvey
  • Russian Circles
  • Soul Asylum
  • Sleater-Kinney
  • Stone Temple Pilots
  • Sultan & Shepherd
  • Tinlicker
  • Tribulation
  • Tool

    Live Shows
  • AEW Dynamite (December)
  • AEW Rampage (December)
  • AEW Collision (June)
  • AEW Dynamite (June)
  • The Hebridean Baker

    Tabletop Games
  • 4bidden Words
  • Cribbage
  • D&D: The Stygian Gambit
  • Hues & Cues
  • Magic the Gathering: Brotherhood Agents
  • One Night Werewolf
  • The Resistance
  • Stifling Dark: Lumber Yard (villain 1)
  • Stifling Dark: Lumber Yard (villain 2)

    Television
  • AEW: Revolution
  • AEW/RoH: Forbidden Door
  • Adventure Time: Season 5
  • Adventure Time: Season 6
  • Adventure Time: Season 7
  • Dragon Prince: Book 5
  • DragonStrike
  • Good Omens: Season One
  • Good Omens: Season Two
  • Good Omens: Season Two (rewatch)
  • He-Man: Masters of the Universe — Revolution
  • The Night Agent
  • Our Flag Means Death: Season Two
  • The Owl House: Season 2
  • Ren Faire
  • Say Nothing

    Computer/Console Games
  • Samorost
  • Wordle

    Albums Acquired
  • Afro Celt Sound System - Volume 2: Release
  • And So I Watch You From Afar - Jettison
  • And So I Watch You From Afar - Megafauna
  • Black Doldrums - In Limerance
  • Blondie - The Real Real Girl
  • The Bothy Band - Out of the Wind, Into the Sun
  • The Bronzed Chorus - Gleaming
  • The Bronzed Chorus - I'm The Spring
  • Joe Burke - The Tailor's Choice
  • Chery Glazzer - I Don't Want You Anymore
  • CHVRCHES - Screen Violence
  • Brian Conway & Tony DeMarco - Apples In Winter
  • Crows - Beware Believers
  • Crows - Reason Enough
  • Crows - Silver Tongue
  • Clarissa Connelly - Tech Duinn
  • Dandy Warhols - The Black Album
  • Dandy Warhols - This Machine
  • Deanta - Ready For The Storm
  • Deanta - Whisper of a Secret
  • Delain - Dark Waters
  • Delain - Moonbathers
  • Todd Denman - A Celtic Peace
  • Todd Denman - Soustice
  • Disturbed - The Sickness
  • Liz Doherty - Let Scotland Flourish
  • Drones & Bellows - The Dancing Dog
  • Elder - Dead Roots Stirring
  • Elder - Innate Passage
  • Elder - Lore
  • Elder - Spires Burn/Release
  • Elderbrook - Simmer Down
  • Elderbrook - Travel Slow
  • The End of the Ocean - In Excelsis
  • Escape-Ism - Rated Z
  • Explosions In The Sky - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place
  • Explosions In The Sky - The End
  • Filska - A Thousand Miles Away
  • Julie Fowlis - Allt
  • Garbage - Bleed Like Me
  • Martin Garrix - Bylaw
  • Martin Garrix - Seven
  • Frankie Gavin - The Master's Return
  • Geraldine Cotter - Traditional Irish Tunes (Disc 1)
  • Geraldine Cotter - Traditional Irish Tunes (Disc 2)
  • Gesaffelstein - Hyperion
  • Gesaffelstein - Novo Sonic System
  • Giolì & Assia - Fire, Hell, and Holy Water
  • Giolì & Assia - Moon Phases
  • God Is An Astronaut - Embers
  • Gothminister - Gothic Electronic Anthems
  • Gothminister - Happiness in Darkness
  • S.C. Hamilton - The Irish Flute Player's Handbook
  • Heilung - Lifa Iotungard
  • The House Band - Another Setting
  • The House Band - October Song
  • The House Band - Rockall
  • Michal Hromek - Celtic Guitar
  • Hyper - Control
  • Keane, Connolly, McGorman - Keane, Connolly, McGorman
  • Brendan Keenan - Brendan Keenan
  • Le Castle Vania - Himmel und Hölle
  • Le Castle Vania - Prophication
  • Le Castle Vania - Troubletron
  • Le Castle Vania - Nobody Gets Out Alive
  • Annie Lennox - Diva
  • Lights & Motion - Bloom
  • Lights & Motion - Chronicle
  • Lights & Motion - Dear Avalanche
  • Lights & Motion - Reanimation
  • Lilt - Onward
  • Lleuwen - Gwin Gan Beibl Budr
  • Robbie MacGowran - The Irish Way
  • Maeve MacKinnon - Don't Sing Love Songs
  • Cathal McConnell - Long Expectant Comes At Last
  • Cathal McConnell & Roger Morton - An Irish Jubilee
  • Ted McGraw - Mostly Set Dances
  • Ted McGraw - Tunes
  • Ted McGraw - More Tunes
  • Ted McGraw - Irish Waltzes
  • Ted McGraw - Scottish Waltzes
  • Ted McGraw - Square and Contra Dance Tunes
  • Ted McGraw - Concertina
  • Therese McInerney & Marian Curtin - The Youth That Belonged To Miltown
  • Justin Mylo - What I Am Looking For
  • Thomas O'Canainn - The Pennyburn Piper
  • Sinead O'Connor - I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
  • Sinead O'Connor - The Lion and the Cobra
  • Conal O'Grada - An Fheadog Mhor
  • Jerry O'Sullivan - The Invasion
  • Opeth - Blackwater Park
  • Opeth - Damnation
  • Pádraic Keane, Páraic Mac Donnechadha, Maedara Ó Faoláin - Beo
  • Poliça - Lipstick Stains / Still Counts
  • Ruefrex - Flowers For All Occassions
  • Russian Circles - Gnosis
  • Sean Ryan - Siuil Uait
  • Sarasara - Elixir
  • Sarasara - Orgone
  • Shallowhalo - Connection
  • Scottish Rogues - Scottish Rogues
  • *Shels - Laurentian's Atoll
  • *Shels - Plains of the Purple Buffalo
  • *Shels - Sea of the Dying Dhow
  • *Shels - Wingsfortheirsmiles
  • Sylvaine - Eg Er Framand
  • Tuesday the Sky - The Blurred Horizon
  • Tuesday the Sky - Drift
  • Tusks - Gold
  • Underworld - Beaucoup Fish
  • Unwed Sailor - Live at Commvess
  • Unwed Sailor - Mute the Charm
  • Unwed Sailor - Tour EP 2011
  • VA - Masters of the Irish Harp
  • Fintan Vallely - Traditional Irish Music
  • Catriona Watt - Cadal Cuain
  • Year Of No Light - Mneme

  • これで以上です。
    ...makes a post.

    The promised heat has reliably arrived when promised; the promised rain, alas, rarely has. (But when it has, it's reliably been when I'm out and about trying to do something and not when I'm at home armed with a book and a chair on the balcony ready to enjoy it.)

    Despite uncooperative weather, though, we've been up to a fair amount recently:

    And So I Watch You From Afar & Caspian: We had tickets to see Caspian and Maserati in 2024, but then, you know, the world ended. So we were very happy not only to get a chance to actually see Caspian, but see them with ASIWYFA, who are one of the post rock greats mainstays I never thought I'd have a chance to see live, given that they're based in Belfast.Read more... ) Just a really great show all around.

    July Crab Feast with the standard GBBQ suspects. Intended to be outdoors, but reliably, it rained. So we crammed into a GBBQ member's garage, and ate a ton.

    GBBQ Dinner Intended to be outdoors, but reliably, it rained. So we crammed into Host's apartment and ate a ton of seven pepper steaks, swordfish, greens, corn, you name it (although pan fried, alas, not grilled). Also excellent was discovering that Host is a huge post metal fan. Also also excellent was discovering that Other Guest, who all already knew was a metal fan, is also into tarot; he recced me a book on A.E. Waite that I hadn't know about yet.

    In gaming news, I am really enjoying:

    MtG Bloomburrow is probably my favorite set in...I don't know how long. The art is my mental images of Redwall, Wind in the Willows, and Beatrix Potter all rolled up onto physical cards and I love it. Forget playing with this set, I just want to look at it. Seriously guys, these cards are a mood.

    Xadia Yes to all the Dragon Prince content, please. The graphics are good, the production is good, and I love spending more time with all these characters...now if it would just stop being so buggy...


    これで以上です。
    ...it's just that life these days is pretty much Baldur's Gate 3. To the tune of I'm going to reach the 400 hours played mark by the end of next week.

    So strap in or set your phasers on ignore, because this DW is probably going to be all BG3 all the time for the foreseeable future.Read more... )

    これで以上です。
    ...makes a post.

    Job continues to be awesome; it's a mark of just how awesome that the commute only started to wear on my this week. (But wear it has. On top of spending hours in the car, I see anywhere from one to four wrecks a day.) But at least it inspires me to do stuff on the weekends, because barring any special events, I'm pretty much coming home, making dinner, and going to bed most weekdays.

    Geek BBQ: Last Saturday was lovely and rainy, and then obliged by letting up in the evening so we could walk to Geek BBQ and do the collage-making event one of the regulars was hosting. The last time I collaged was *mumblemumble* decades ago, when I started an (as yet unfinished) deck of Tarot cards, so it was a lot of fun to return to after so long. I ended up doing a double-sided 10x10 inch square with a mixture of nature imagery, Babylonian ruins, and bits and pieces of Phlegm murals.

    Concerts: We missed actual Geek BBQ night to go see a show instead, namely Sleater-Kinney. I cannot overstate how excited I was about this show. I had to jump through hoops to buy my first Sleater-Kinney album back in the day, because no one within a four-hour drive would carry it. A Sleater-Kinney t-shirt was—no joke—the second thing I ever bought on the World Wide Web. (I had to go to the bank, buy a cashier's check, put it in the actual postal mail, and then wait for said mail to get to Oregon, for whoever ran Sleater-Kinney's website to cash the check and mail my t-shirt to me, without really knowing if and when I'd get it. Insane compared to the situation today.)

    Anyway, the plan was to walk the four-odd miles to the venue's neighborhood, get dinner at another nearby venue, and then head over to the show itself but it didn't exactly work out that way. ) Such a great show and I was on an endorphin high from it for a day.

    D&D: Another session with Oldest D&D Group this week. We had a pretty intense battle in which I got to play around with some fun warlock capabilities. And I think we might have unleashed a lich into the wild. ...Oops? (I'm sure this will in no way come back to haunt us. DX)

    St. Paddy's Day (Observed) We didn't participate in the parade this year because: scheduling conflict, but as a consolation prize Aslin released a limited edition imperial stout—Special Flute—today. (And with a name like that, how could I not try it.) I got two (because the GC knocked my first glass over) and it was very good. It's very close to Padrino (in fact, I suspect it's almost exactly the same thing). Afterward we grabbed some ingredients for the session with Second Oldest D&D Group tomorrow, and I bought a button fern, because.

    Building Bullshit: Downstairs woke us up twice at 2 am this week having their regularly scheduled fights. I came downstairs this morning to find Overnight Security Guard and Day Concierge dropping more F-bombs than I've ever heard packed into a discrete amount of seconds (and I say this as a frequent F-bomb dropper myself).
    Choice quote: "These are motherfucking adults and the fucking management company expects us to fucking baby-fucking-sit their motherfucking asses."
    Both plan to quit, which would mark the third pair to do so in the last five? six? weeks.

    The anger and disgust were apparently occasioned by several individuals who, after being banned from the building earlier this week ... )

    So the Tenants Association Board had office hours downstairs this morning, and the GC and I, and a bunch of other people went down to talk to them about this stuff and everything else that's been going on. More than one person was advocating for better treatment for the day and overnight personnel, so hopefully something comes of it, because said people deserve it.

    これで以上です。
    ...makes a post!

    Job stuff! February found me commuting to a new worksite that requires 2+ hours in the car each day, which has significantly cut down on the leisure time things I'm able to do in a day. That said, the work is awesome, and I'm having a blast doing it while I'm onsite.

    Concerts! This time, Falling in Reverse and Disturbed.

    I knew more about the drama surrounding Falling in Reverse (even predating the Paige/Suraya connection) than I did their music, which turned out to be...fine. It wasn't bad in a concert venue setting but also wasn't anything distinguished enough that I'd seek it out again on my own. What did distinguish the band was the lead singer publicly berating a member of his stage crew, at length and by name, after something apparently went wrong toward the end of the show. Like, dude, you have just generated a lot of sympathy from me for someone, and it isn't you. Super gross and unnecessary, particularly when it became clear the lead singer wasn't even capable of generating entry-level stage patter to fill the silence after he'd finished dropping f-bombs on the stage hand.

    Disturbed, on the other hand, was excellent as ever. We'd seen them live last summer (with Jinjer and Breaking Benjamin), so the stage set and much of the set list were pretty familiar, but man they put on a good show. Just a ton of energy and excitement, which is exactly what I wanted from the experience. The audience energy was great: people were as into it as we were.

    Side note: the Baltimore concert tee bootleggers' game is fabulous. Por ejemplo: they didn't even bother to photoshop out the vendor "low tix" warning icons out of screencap they used for the dates on their Disturbed bootleg tee. These guys dngaf and it's great.

    Bonus beer: We had dinner at The Brewer's Art, whose Resurrection abbey brown ale I'm a big fan of. The food was great and so were the other beers, particularly their GPT green peppercorn trippel and Daytrip to Yorkshire English old ale.

    Building Bullshit! Has been so egregious and frequent I've stopped posting about it as it happens. Suffice to say that the building was on fire three times in February, the upstairs tenants flooded our kitchen and closet again when they got high and failed to turn off the faucet in their kitchen again, and our bathroom flooded again after the management company failed to fix the crumbling pipes in our again. We called maintenance at 3:00 in the afternoon when we came home and discovered the problem, but wouldn't you know? The maintenance number listed on the building website and provided to the concierge and answering service was wrong—as has been the case since January when the building manager was first notified of the issue.
    But wait! There's more!

    On top of that, the management company erroneously sent out notices informing tenants that we hadn't paid rent and that the management company was going to initiate eviction proceedings, again. (Seriously, this is the third time this has happened in the last six months, and the notices to go pretty much everyone in the building, including people like us who religiously pay rent on the 1st of each month.)

    This is especially ironic given that the management company didn't think to position the cameras they finally agreed to install in the lobby in such a way as to cover the rent drop box, which was robbed. (Following the robbery, the management company helpfully sent letters to tenants saying that we were responsible for making sure management company received our rent on time, would need to submit payment again if our payments were among those stolen from the rent drop box, and that tenants were responsible for assuming any costs associated with cancelling checks that had been stolen from the rent drop box, which management suggested that we do.

    TL;DR—you would think that after this, the management company would reposition the cameras to cover the rent drop box.

    WELL. THEY DID NOT.

    And it was robbed again. Rinse, repeat. Following this, the management company informed tenants that they were doing away with the rent drop box and that everyone would have to submit payments electronically in the future. This is fine for us, but not for other folks in the building, for specific reasons. Following intervention from the Tenants' Association and city authorities, the management company has informed us that they will be installing a new rent drop box behind the concierge desk. Hopefully they don't put it in a camera blindspot this time.


    D&D! Season Three of Oldest D&D Group's homebrew campaign reconvened. The party continues to be as ineptfective as ever. Por ejemplo: across two sessions, we somehow ended up guarding a caravan, ambushed the brigands who were trying to ambush us and defeated them by, among other things, conjuring octopi to drop on their heads, lost half the caravan to hobgoblin raiders, and then ended up with twice as many wagons after we raided the raiders, in a process that happened to involve polymorphing various party members into horses and setting a lot of things on fire.

    Second Oldest D&D Group's Saltmarsh campaign reconvened, with a marathon seven-hour battle session that honestly was a bit of a slog, at least for me. (I'm the only player in the group who doesn't use my phone during sessions. In a bid to get the others to pay attention, the DM gave them four additional units to control. This did not lead to less phone usage but resulted in my having one attack per the other players' three to nine, each turn. Ugh.) Things picked up in the following sessions, however, once the DM rebalanced the play mechanics. Subsequent sessions have featured a lot of great combats against some pretty tough critters, as well as the chance use do outside-the-box tactics to defeat them.

    D&D Pt. II! We randomly ran into two of the players from Third Oldest D&D Group while out preparing for Geek BBQ Mardi Gras (for which, see below). This group's campaign has been on hiatus since last summer, but will be starting back up again. That was welcome news. Furthermore, as it's an online campaign, I hadn't actually seen these guys in the flesh since the Beforetimes, so it was delightful to have run into them.

    D&D Pt. III! Boy, I was not in the headspace to handle BG3 last summer. Last month, I jettisoned my previous games and started fresh. I am definitely in the headspace for it now. I'm really enjoying the tie-ins to Escape from Avernus, and wondering whether any of the Shar/Selûne stuff that's being hinted at ties back in any way to Shar/Selûne developments in BG/BG2 EE. Also, holy crap, this is a great game.

    Deadpool 3 Trailer Release Party! Which also apparently involved some sort of major sporting event? IDEK. 😛 At any rate, the food and company were fabulous. I brought a ginger carrot miso dip that people seemed to really like, and people really liked the Aslin sour—Durango Doug—we brought.

    Bonus beer: I also picked up a four-pack of Aslin's Orchid imperial stout + vanilla that may be one of my favorite things they've done since Padrino.)

    Gaelg! The mid-February holiday meant I was actually able to join in to an online speaking thing. It was exceptionally fun, especially because this is one of the nichest of my niche interests. (Prior to a few years ago, I figured this was a language I would never actually get to, you know, speak to anyone with.) It's weirdly one of the languages I find most intuitive, and I was able to make some decently complex sentences. I got complements on my accent, too. And again, it's just a bunch of fun to be actively using it.

    Geek BBQ! Following on the heels of Geek BBQ Friendsgiving, Geek BBQ whiskey white elephant, and Geek BBQ dessert potluck, Geek BBQ put together a Mardi Gras potluck. The music was excellent, the decorations were excellent, and I probably ate my body weight in homemade jambalaya and gumbo. Very good stuff with a very good group of people.

    Ice Skating 2.No! Geek BBQ friend called out of the blue one morning to invite us to a free skate at the ice complex. We were skeptical we'd be able to make it in time but were ultimately won over by friend's enthusiasm. Fast forward a hectic 40 minutes later when friend called back to say that they + friend 3 weren't going after all. Luckily, we had not actually paid for the skate yet. We had, however, jettisoned our lazy day in to trek out to the suburbs. What to do? We ended up having brunch at a favorite old venue, which happened to be showing a Scotland vs. Wales rugby match to a probable majority of the area's very enthusiastic fans. It was great energy and a lot of fun.

    Karaoke! We decided to eat dinner at a newly opened Thai place before going to Geek BBQ. The food was excellent. We were the only people in the place aside from the server and the manager, who coincidentally happened to be there. Which was amazingly fortuitous and cool, because they invited us into the basement, which they had converted into a karaoke bar, and we got to sing. For free. Whatever and for as long as we wanted. I knocked out a significant portion of Roxette's back catalogue and it was spectacular.

    LNY! We went out for dim sum with second oldest D&D group. Our intended destination was a bust (pro tip: do not try to go eat somewhere in a busy shopping center during a major holiday where the parking lot has been converted into stages, seating, and booths). Luckily, we knew of a second dim sum place nearby with really great food, went there, and ate ourselves silly.


    What's my language progress look like? This month I primarily blew through the supplementary hangeul lessons. These are surprisingly useful because I learned Korean directly through hangeul, which means that I never actually learned how to romanize it.
    • Chinese — 1/5 through Unit 5; legendary through Unit 2
    • Dutch — 4/5 through Unit 3; legendary through Unit 1
    • Gaelic — 4/5 through Unit 6; legendary through Unit 3
    • Hindi — 1/2 through Unit 2; backburnered until I wrap up a physical textbook
    • Indonesian — 1/5 through Unit 11; legendary through Unit 6
    • Japanese — 1/5 through Unit 21; legendary through Unit 16
    • Korean — 1/2 through Unit 8; legendary through Unit 5
    • Latin — 4/5 through Unit 2; legendary through Unit 1
    • Welsh — 1/2 through Unit 1; backburnered in favor of a physical textbook


    これで以上です。
    lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
    ( Feb. 1st, 2024 07:14 pm)
    ...makes a post.

    Despite some bright spots, I was very pleased to leave 2023 behind. So far 2024 has been a vast improvement.

    New Year's Eve marked our return to the giant countdown bash a friend holds every year. While fewer of our close friends were there than in Years Pre-Pandemic, it was still loads of fun. There was a live DJ that was good, a cover band that was very good, and they'd ironed out the lack-of-food problem from years previous.

    Snow! One day on which a little fell and I got to stay home from work, and one day on which a ton fell and I had to take the day off from work (which was absolutely worth it). The lack of snow during winter is one of my biggest gripes about this area, so it was nice to have gotten some.

    Concerts! Namely, Elder and Tool. I'd been aware of Elder but had never gotten around to seeking their music out. We really liked what we could hear of them live (the sound quality was not great; I have the strong suspicion Maynard Keenan makes sure his opening acts can't upstage him) and now have most of their back catalogue.

    Tool was great as always (their sound quality was just dandy 🙄) and they played a lot of the deeper cuts we wanted to hear along with some crowd pleasers. Keenan was grumpy that his stage banter did not get a very enthusiastic reaction, but that's what you get for recycling the same stage banter every tour. The visuals were heavier on alien invasion/occult apocalypse weirdness than anatomy weirdness, but good all the same. And as pretty much everyone at our hotel was also there for this show, we had a lot of good conversations with people before, during, and after the main event.

    Birthdays! The first for one of the players in my main D&D campaign. We went to a regional geek bar, ate, drank, and did a bunch of tabletop gaming, which included a good mix of games I've played before and games that were new to me.

    The second, for one of the other players in my main D&D campaign was also a blast. We went ice skating! I haven't been skating in decades. I didn't realize how much I'd missed it, and was pleasantly surprised at how much of it came back, and how quickly. Plus, the complex's rental skates were ice hockey versus figure skates. (Back when we were learning, both ma soeur and I wanted to get ice hockey lessons, but mes parents were adamant that we do figure skating because ice hockey Was Not Appropriate For Little Girls.) So it was nice to get a taste of the other side after all this time.

    Geek BBQ! Specifically, the first Geek BBQ regulars event of 2024, which was a dessert potluck. I am only slightly exaggerating when I say I ate more sugary things during those four hours than I had during the entirety of 2023 (I am a savory tastes versus sweet tastes person). But oh man, the desserts were so good, the variety was incredible, and the company was excellent as always.

    What's my language progress look like?
    • Chinese — 4/5 through Unit 4; legendary through Unit 2
    • Dutch — 4/5 through Unit 3; legendary through Unit 1
    • Gaelic — 4/5 through Unit 6; legendary through Unit 3
    • Hindi — 1/2 through Unit 2; backburnered until I wrap up a physical textbook
    • Indonesian — 1/5 through Unit 11; legendary through Unit 6
    • Japanese — 4/5 through Unit 20; legendary through Unit 16
    • Korean — 1/5 through Unit 8; legendary through Unit 5
    • Latin — 4/5 through Unit 2; legendary through Unit 1
    • Welsh — 1/2 through Unit 1; backburnered in favor of a physical textbook

    これで以上です。
    lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
    ( Jan. 2nd, 2024 05:50 pm)
    Another wrap-up post? Sure, why not. I'm only listing media I actively consumed and finished (i.e., no movies on in the background, no games or television series still in progress, no podcasts where I cherrypicked specific episodes to listen to).

    Given everything that went down, I really didn't have the attention span or joy in imagination to consume much visual media in the latter half of the year, but that means there's just more for me to wrap up this year. On the flip side, it was a pretty good year for live music (and we didn't even get to half of the shows we were interested in seeing).

    I may come back at some point and add notes or thoughts about each, but for starters, let's just get the list down.

    Movies
  • Ant Man: Quantumania

  • The Banshees of Inisherin

  • Barbie

  • A Christmas Story

  • Dungeons & Dragons

  • Flash

  • Guardians of the Galaxy 3

  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail

  • National Lampoon Christmas Vacation

  • Oppenheimer

  • The Room

  • Scrooged

  • Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse

  • Spotlight

  • 올빼미

    TV
  • Adventure Time: Season 3

  • Adventure Time: Season 4

  • Last Week Tonight: Season 10

  • Legend of Vox Machina: Season 2

  • Loki: Season 2

  • Ms. Marvel

  • The Owl House: Season 1

  • Ragnarok: Season 1

  • Werewolf by Night

    Podcasts
  • 30for30: Bikram

    Computer/Console Games
  • Wordle

    Live Music
  • 100 Gecs

  • 311

  • Asking Alexandria

  • Beck

  • Bush

  • Breaking Benjamin

  • Candlebox

  • Cherry Glazrr

  • Cold War Kids

  • Collective Soul

  • Dandy Warhols

  • Disturbed

  • Explosions in the Sky

  • Fear Factory

  • Fever Ray

  • Filter

  • Franz Ferdinand

  • Garbage

  • Godsmack

  • The Hu

  • I Ya Toyah

  • Jinjer

  • Live

  • Live (unplugged)

  • Machinegirl

  • Matt & Kim

  • Metric

  • Mix Master Mike

  • Mushroomhead

  • No Second Troy

  • Noel Gallagher's Flying Circus

  • Paul Okenfold

  • Phoenix

  • Pixies

  • Stabbing Westward

  • Staid

  • Static-X

  • Silversun Pickups

  • Toni Smooth

  • Visors

  • Walkaways

  • Yeah Yeah Yeahs

    Live TV
  • AEW Dynamite

  • AEW Rampage

    Tabletop Games

  • The Captain Is Dead

  • Delta Green one-shot

  • D&D Delian Tomb homebrew campaign

  • D&D Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

  • D&D Feywild homebrew campaign

  • D&D Homebrew campaign: Season 2

  • D&D Spelljammer homebrew campaign #1

  • D&D Spelljammer homebrew campaign #2

  • D&D Spelljammer Jpop homebrew campaign playtest



    これで以上です。
  • Covering the first five months of the year.

    Doing. )


    Playing. )


    Reading. )


    Watching. )


    Writing. )

    これで以上です。
    Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of white ice crystals/snowflakes on a dark green background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31

    Challenge #5


    In your own space, promote a canon/talk about a part of canon that you love. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


    I'm going for a deep cut: the Ultima computer games, particularly Ultima VI: The False Prophet. )

    これで以上です。
    lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
    ( Jan. 1st, 2021 12:12 pm)
    For anyone new to my DW who wants a bit of context, this post should help orient you. Feel free to comment or subscribe at will (and introduce yourself, if you like!) Pretty much everything I post aside from in-progress drafts is unlocked.

    In general, I post about:
    My Current Obsessions: Baldur's Gate 3, Vinland Saga, Whisper of Ravens

    My Forever Fandoms Baldur's Gate, Blake & Avery, Discworld, Farscape, Fullmetal Alchemist, The Goblin Emperor, Imperial Radch, Lord of the Rings, Onmyoji, The Queen's Thief, Saiyuki, Silver Diamond, X-Files

    My Fandoms of One: Akitsuki Koh's manga and novels, Paraic O'Donnell's The House on Vesper Sands, Naono Bohra's manga, Sugiura Shiho's 終点unknown

    My Old Flames: Adventure Time, Bleach, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castlevania, D-Gray.man, Death Note, Destiny, Dredd, Final Fantasy, Firefly, Good Omens, Harry Potter, Magnus Archives, MCU, Our Flag Means Death, Samurai Flamenco, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, Suikoden, Vampire Chronicles, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Welcome to Night Vale

    My Enduring Interests AEW, Anime, BL & danmei, Books, Calligraphy & fountain pens, Foreign language learning, Gardening, Irish traditional music, Manga, Roleplaying games, Tabletop gaming, Tarot, Yoga

    My What Am I Reading Wednesday posts are here and my fanfic is here. Maybe one day I'll add my early orphaned works to my account.

    2026 Multimedia List
    Movies


  • Podcasts


  • Live Music


  • Live Shows


  • PPVs


  • Tabletop Games


  • Television


  • Computer/Console Games


  • Albums Acquired


  • これで以上です。
    Last night, the Vice President announced that members of the Space Force will be called "Guardians."

    To which: )

    これで以上です。
    ...my life has been consumed by puzzles. )

    Before I had any idea that November 7 was going to be anything other than A Day, I engaged in a marathon stress clean of the living spaces. )

    These efforts were assisted today by the delightful surprise acquisition of another shelf. )

    And finally, last week's language learning. )

    これで以上です。
    lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
    ( Jun. 8th, 2020 12:01 pm)
    Food & Fandom
    The past few weeks have found us increasingly subsumed into AEW's entertainment ecosystem. I suppose it was only a matter of time: we already watch Dynamite and now AEW Dark pretty regularly. To which we may now add AEW's online cooking segment; a timely discovery since we've already watched each episode of HU's in the kitchen? several times. And anyway, I am a sucker for cooking shows where the hosts eyeball the ingredients, because that is how I cook too.

    June 6, or The Gaming Day That Wasn't
    We logged on to the Destiny servers at 1:03 to watch the live event. Virtually no players were there, although a few rando NPCs were pointing up at the sky. Had the event already ended? Was Bungie waiting for more players to show up before starting whatever it was that we were there to see? We checked back in after half an hour or so of grinding, but nothing had changed, so we logged off.

    Of course, everything went down right after that. So we missed all the missiles and the Almighty crashing to earth. A bit of a bummer, but not so much of one that I regret not sitting around for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon to see it.

    Larian was also set to preview new Baldur's Gate 3 content on the 6th, but #GuerrillaCollective announced on the 4th that they were pushing this back to June 13-15 to allow for Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which was a very cool thing to do.

    これで以上です。
    My household reached peak coronavirus living. )

    On the RPG front, our online homebrew campaign continues to exceed the heights of last month's epic three-hour in-game shopping extravaganza as the party accidentally seduces random NPCs with terrible saving throws and sets pretty much everything we encounter on fire. As a character whose fault is "makes jokes at inappropriate times," I am uniquely positioned to capitalize on this, and boy do I make hay.

    I've also used the pandemic's reduction in diversions to catch up on AEW and oh man, it continues to be everything I love about wrestling: great storylines, great matches, and while I have mixed feelings about Jericho as a wrestler, as a commentator he is an absolute delight and I would tune in each week on the strength of that alone.

    But then you combine Jericho with the puro resu shenanigans/awesomesauce that Kenny Omega et al. are bringing, and it's just that. Much. Better.

    And on top of all that, Brodie Lee continues to kill it with his promos. )

    これで以上です。
    And now for the better stuff.

    Acquiring the overpriced, POS laptop (now dubbed Oppos) meant I was able to join one of my two regular D&D groups for last night’s session. I always look forward to these sessions, and even more so now that they are the main social event left to most of the players. Read more... )

    In other news, Charles Yu has a new book!


    I can’t believe I only found out about this the other day—especially since it’s been out since January 27th, and Yu’s How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of my all time favorite books. I have been eagerly awaiting another volume from him, and I am super excited to finally get to read one.

    In other book news, a very good friend became the first person I know well to catch coronavirus; they have spent the last few weeks isolated in their bedroom while their partner leaves them meals and other necessities outside the door. This is objectively awful and could not have happened to someone who deserved it less. On the bright side, I sent them The Goblin Emperor to read, so here comes one more into the fold.

    In televised entertainment, AEW has steadily moved in to fill the wrestling void since I—for Reasons—abandoned WWE for good in 2018, to the point where I finally gave in to the inevitable and started watching Dynamite. I have not been disappointed. And then came THIS. )

    Keep cutting those promos, Brody Lee, because I will keep eating them out of your hand.

    And finally, Castlevania season 4 is confirmed!


    これで以上です。
    I spent the long weekend binge eating Indian home cooking and sipping 8th Wonder's Rocket Fuel porter, which is pretty excellent as far as long weekends go.

    I also got my hands on this:

    which we declined to buy at our local game store two years ago because it was heavy(!!) and we wanted to walk home--a decision we have rued ever since. This particular copy is a Giftmas gift that was delivered to a friend of the GC’s through a shipping misfire. We were finally able to collect it this weekend and cart all 22 pounds of it through the airport and multiple modes of public transit, where it attracted the attention of metro staff and the women at the check-in counter who (no joke) made us unbox it for them. And apparently the TSA, who unboxed it again at some point after we sent it on its way to the belly of the airplane. D:

    Then this arrived today:

    I hope my friends, family, and colleagues remember who I am, because I am not likely to be mentally present for anyone or anything until I've finished it.

    If that weren't enough, the FFVII Remake opening goes a long way toward compensating for the fact that it's no longer coming out on my birthday. Then there was the Castlevania 3 trailer, which, OMG.

    And then.

    AND THEN.

    And then came today's little announcement of a Baldur's Gate 3 gameplay reveal in ten days.

    To say that I am OVER THE MOON about this would be a slight understatement.

    Full disclosure: I have both Divinity games. My friends love them. I have not managed to play more than a few hours of either before moving on to something else. But I am completely sold by the genuine, enthusiastic geekery of the Larian crew in their promo videos. And I am so, so excited for this game, I am going to go nuts when it's finally out, and I cannot wait to see what next Thursday's reveal brings.

    これで以上です。
    .

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